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“It barely shows.”
His fingers fell away. “Still…the physical evidence remains. We’ve had more brushes with fate than any two people should have to endure.”
The moment—and the references—were awkward.
Whitney’s smile thinned. Logan deftly changed the subject. Again.
“Damn, I’ve driven by this place a hundred times. I can’t believe you own it.”
“Lease it,” Whitney qualified.
“So…” he said softly, considering. “You’re the teddy bear lady.”
Whitney tipped her head. “Please. Don’t you dare say it’s cute. I love it, but it’s a business and it pays the bills. I have every kind and type of teddy bear you could ever imagine.”
“I guess you do.” Logan swept the room with an all-inclusive look. It was jam-packed with teddy bears. Teddy bear toothbrushes swung on a revolving display, and teddy bear books were wedged on teddy bear bookshelves. There were teddy bear clocks, jewelry, stationery and stickers. Teddy bear erasers, pencils, pens and rulers. Framed prints, and bath accessories. Even shower curtains, regular curtains, blankets and rugs. He chuckled, his smile riding a tad bit higher on the left. “But I never intended to say ‘cute.’ I’m impressed. It’s a great concept. When I look around, I’m inclined to buy the store out.”
“What? And reduce my inventory?” she asked dryly.
“Whitney, this place is great. And it’s just like you to think of something this clever.”
The praise startled Whitney, putting a pink flush in her cheeks.
“What?” he asked, mimicking her. “Am I embarrassing you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean it. You were the one who always came up with the most creative ideas in high school. You were the one with the interesting slant on life.”
“Out of necessity.”
“Right. Like the time you suggested that instead of having a formal banquet for the National Honor Society, we have a picnic? That was the best day ever, and you were responsible for it. A whole day at the beach, playing Frisbee, and volleyball, and splashing around.”
A shred of guilt crept into Whitney’s conscience; she’d suggested the idea because she didn’t have the twenty-five dollars for the banquet ticket.
“And what about that idea you had for prom? Fifties night at the Peppermint Lounge? We got by decorating with peppermint sticks, borrowed a jukebox and used the rest of the money in the treasury for catering the senior banquet so it didn’t cost any of us a cent.” A second guilty flush prickled over the back of Whitney’s neck. She’d intended to go, and wear an old fifties formal Gram had tucked away in the attic. “And to top it off,” he went on, “after you came up with the idea, you never even went to the prom. I specifically went looking for you, to con you out of one dance.”
Whitney shrugged, her smile tight as she minimized the details. “Gram’s health was kind of up and down just then.”
Logan sobered. “You always did have a lot of responsibility looking after her.”
“Logan. She was looking after me.”
“I think,” he said slowly, “you looked after each other.” He chuckled, as another memory hit him. “Your gram was something else, though. I’ll never forget how she rode all over Melville on that three-wheel bike of hers.”
Whitney shifted uncomfortably; Gram had ridden a bicycle because they couldn’t afford a car. The truth was, Whitney and Logan had hung out with different crowds, and had literally been from opposite sides of the have/have-not world.
Logan had lived in a big house on the hill, and spent his summers tanning at the country club. His parents owned several car dealerships, and made sure their only son never lacked for a thing. He’d loved playing the part of the big, brash jock, and had run around Melville in a brand-new sports car, making sure he was noticed on every intersection by revving his engine and waving at all the girls.
Whitney, raised by her grandmother, had lived in a rented bungalow just off of Main. It was a dilapidated little house, with a barren scrap of a front yard, and a painted tractor tire that held a few scraggly petunias. Whitney never invited friends in because they stared at the black spots on the linoleum, the water rings on the drop ceiling, and the peeling wallpaper in the front room. Still, she loved Gram dearly, and it would have cut her to the quick to have anyone say Gram hadn’t provided for her.
Without warning, Logan reached across her, to skim the tiny teddy bear charm from around her neck and balance it on the pad of his forefinger. The fine gold chain swayed beneath her chin, pulling slightly.
“Just like this shop…” he said, catching Whitney’s eye. This close, the sloe-dark color on her eyelids was fascinating. He leaned closer, thinking she smelled like a crazy mixture of vanilla and fabric softener. The links in the necklace, draped over the hollow of her throat, rolled up and down with every breath she took. “Details. Perfect details, Whit. Only you could pull this off.”
“Maybe. But teddy bears aren’t as fancy as real estate, or owning car dealerships or a marina, so—”
“No,” he said quickly, letting the teddy bear charm fall from the tip of his finger. “It fits. Only you could do something this memorable. Something that would touch people and put a soft spot in their heart.”
Whitney shuddered. Matters of the heart were the last thing she wanted to discuss. Especially with Logan Monroe. “Okay, Logan,” she said unsteadily, “I know you didn’t come in here to give me warm fuzzies, and admire my shop. What’s up?”
Logan’s mouth quirked, but the light in his eyes slowly faded. “I came in here to replace a teddy bear,” he said, his tone subtly changing. “I should have done it months ago, but…hey, look,” he went on, his voice suddenly lifting, “I want to show you something. In fact, I’m proud to show you this little something….” Logan reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, flipping through the plastic windows. On the opposite side, a sliver of plastic showed: American Express Platinum.
Whitney blanched, thinking how some things—even a piece of plastic—can put you in your place. In her wallet, she carried only one low-limit credit card to the local discount store. It had been all she could do to get this store off the ground, and every cent she’d had she put back into the business. For a year, she’d slept on a rollaway in the back room and cooked on a hot plate.
“Here,” he announced, pausing at the photo of a little girl perched on a wicker rocker. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, and in her hands, and propped over her shoulder, an exquisite lace parasol framed the tangle of flaxen curls cascading over her shoulders. “I had this taken for my wife two years ago. For Mother’s Day.”
Whitney couldn’t breathe. “Your daughter?” she said numbly. She knew Logan had married a girl from Memphis, but she hadn’t known they’d had a child.
“My foster daughter.”
“The bear’s for her,” Whitney guessed, vaguely hearing his clarification.
He nodded. “See?” he said. “That’s the bear she always used to carry around. The photographer propped it against the chair because Amanda insisted it had to be in the picture. She never went anywhere without it.”
Amanda. Her name was Amanda.
“She’s darling, Logan.”
His smile was full and proud. “Thanks. And I want a teddy bear just like that.”
Whitney started, and swiveled toward Logan. “That may not be possible,” she warned before squinting back at the photo. She wasn’t able to make out any real details, but there were thousands of styles of teddy bears, and hundreds of manufacturers with their own distinctive signature.
“I don’t think it was very unusual, probably the dime-store variety, but I want the exact same thing.” He paused, before going on to explain, “She lost it…the day my wife died.”
Whitney slowly lifted her eyes, pinning him. She tried to detect his grief, but only saw carefully veiled shadows in his faintly lined face. “I’m so sorry, Logan…about your wife. I should have offered my condolences first, before we started talking. The moment you walked in the door, I should have said…”
He held up a hand, stopping her. “No, that’s okay. Two more months and it’ll be a year. I’m getting used to it. No one could have predicted an aneurysm, not in someone that young…It was a shock, but…I don’t talk about it much.”
“Still…I should have sent a card.”
An uncomfortable second of silence slipped away.
“Why didn’t you?” he asked bluntly after a moment.
“I—I didn’t know if you’d want to hear from me,” she said honestly.
He stared at her, as if measuring his response before uttering it. “Whitney. Forget it. The thing with your husband has been over with for a long time.”
“My ex-husband,” she said quietly.
The wallet he held dropped a fraction of an inch. “Oh? I always wondered. I just didn’t think it would be good to—you know…” He didn’t say it, but she knew. It wouldn’t be a good idea to fraternize in any way, shape, or form with the wife of a small town, small time crook. Especially after you threatened to press charges for dipping into the petty cash.
“I found out you weren’t the first employer he took advantage of. He worked at the grocery and filched steaks from the freezer. He worked at the gas station and helped himself to gas from the pumps.”
“If I could have avoided firing him, I would have, Whitney.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
She shrugged. “This is hard for me, Logan. You do me a favor by offering him a job, and then he repays you by letting a few twenties attach themselves to his fingers.”
“It was a long time ago, Whit,” he said brusquely. “We’d both be better off to put it in the past. In the whole scheme of things it really isn’t important.”
Right. One deplorable incident. Gone, but not entirely forgotten.
Whitney took a deep, cleansing breath, reminding herself that whatever followed between her and Logan was business, and business only. “So,” she said, “tell me about this bear.”
He pulled the photo back into their line of vision. “I thought maybe you might have something…in the store…”
Whitney shook her head. She should have studied the bear, but instead her gaze was drawn to the child. “I don’t think so. But we can look. I’ll flip over the Closed sign and, even if it takes all night, you can go through my inventory.”
That wheedled a small, sad smile from him. He slowly closed the wallet, as if considering her offer.
“She’s a darling little girl, Logan,” Whitney said carefully. “I had no idea you were a daddy.”
“Yeah. We got her when she was about three years old. So I honestly think of her as my daughter. I love her as if—as if—” Logan’s voice dried up, and he suddenly choked over the sentence he couldn’t bring himself to say.
As if she were your daughter, Whitney silently finished for him. She studied him, fascinated. For a devil-may-care personality, he had the kindest heart. Always had. “Logan?” she queried, summoning the courage to touch him, to lay her hand on his forearm. “What is it?”
Logan’s eyes closed, shutting her out of his pain. He twisted slightly at the waist, and her hand dropped away, as he put the wallet back into his pocket. “We were in the process of adopting her, but there was a lot of red tape. It took us a long time to find the biological parents and when we located them, the father agreed to relinquish his rights—but the mother kept changing her mind. Then, last year, the mother finally signed away her rights and the adoption was in the final stages. But then Jill died, leaving me as a single father, and now the agency is stalling. The caseworker says my company takes too much of my time, and that they feel it’s in Amanda’s best interest to be raised in a two-parent household. She told me last week they have a couple who inquired about adopting an older child, preferably a girl. She left me with the feeling that they could remove Amanda from the house. Maybe within the next few weeks.”
Whitney went limp all over. She knew what is was like to be jerked out of one home and dropped into another. Her mother had experimented with boyfriends, and communes, and middle-of-the-night flights from unpaid landlords and unfortunate affairs. “Oh, Logan, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do….”
“You can. Help me get this bear for Amanda before they take her away. I don’t want her to think I’m abandoning her. Hell, I’d do anything to keep her.”
“Does she have any idea?”
Logan shook his head. “The social worker’s intimated things to her, suggested that maybe she would like another house, with a new mommy…”
Whitney groaned, the small of her back sinking against the counter. “No. Tell me she didn’t say that?”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “She did. I suppose she meant well. But Amanda will be traumatized if they take her away. She’s too young to remember her life prior to living with us. We’re all she’s ever known.”
Whitney’s vision blurred. She vividly remembered a grocery sack full of clothes, a nonchalant goodbye and a pat on the head from her mother.
“Sure, as a single dad, I’ve had a few mishaps along the way,” he confided. “But I’ve learned from them. I’ve even learned how to make fifteen nutritious variations of canned spaghetti.”
“Nutritious canned spaghetti?” She couldn’t help it—she laughed.
He lifted an apologetic shoulder. “On the food chain, it’s one notch above tuna, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
Whitney had to bite her bottom lip. Her cheeks ached from trying not to smile. Her mother had never even cared enough to even open a can of tuna, let alone slap peanut butter on a slice of bread.
“Whitney, listen to me,” he said earnestly. “If I replace that bear, and Amanda’s taken away, it’ll give her a connection to something she loved. She needs to know that no matter what happens, I’m there for her. I love that kid so much—so damn much—that the thought of losing her, just….”
A hot, hard lump swelled in Whitney’s throat; she willed her response to be firm, not shaky. God knows, she’d do anything for Logan. All he had to do was ask. “I can tell you right now I don’t have anything like it in the store. But I’ll find it,” Whitney said. “I promise.”
“Can you believe this? Can you believe I’m looking for a teddy bear?” he asked humorlessly. “Sometimes I think it would just be easier to find myself a wife. Maybe that would make the caseworker happy.”
Whitney stared into the depths of his ice-blue eyes and the most unimaginable thought crossed her mind. She just couldn’t bring herself to say it. Suddenly she was paralyzed by the awesomeness of it all.
She vaguely considered offering herself up as the sacrificial lamb.
“Whitney?”
A second slipped away.
“Yes, Logan?”
“Thank you,” he said simply. “For you to do this, especially after everything that’s happened…well, it makes me realize I overlooked something very special in high school.”
The expression of gratitude took her breath away. His praise was so unexpected. As teenagers, they had shared a few laughs, the same row of seats in study hall, and, on Senior Skip Day, one near kiss…something that, in later years, she’d silently regretted as her “one near miss.” Later, when Logan offered her ex a job, and he’d so badly messed that up, she had apologized repeatedly, hoping to redeem herself in Logan’s eyes. But Logan had been young and angry, and he’d stalked away.
After years of beating herself up over that horrific parting it seemed inconceivable that all she had to do to make things better was find a teddy bear. It was a small price to pay to be able to put the matter to rest, and get the man and the memories out of her mind.
Still, Whitney would never know what prompted her to say what she did next, maybe it was because she was a new woman and she had come of age, and into her own. She had the security, and the confidence to dare to remind him. “Not something,” she corrected quietly. “Someone. You overlooked someone. Someone like me.”
Chapter Two
Logan leaned back, as far as his leather desk chair would allow, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It had been a long, wearisome day. He was bone-tired and the house looked like a tornado had struck. Four hours ago, his third housekeeper quit to take care of her grandchildren in California, and he was at his wit’s end.
All he’d asked of the woman was to supervise Amanda after school and put a hot meal on the table. She’d accepted his generous paycheck, and done exactly that and no more. The laundry was piled up to the rafters, the sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and the carpets reminded him of one giant lint trap. Amanda had taken to writing her name on the TV screen, and playing tic-tac-toe in the dust on the coffee table. Games and toys, and shoes and socks were scattered in every room in the house, and the counters were a hodgepodge of newspapers, magazines, advertisements and old mail.
How had Jill done it? She’d managed to get Amanda to school on time, and he never remembered her scrambling to find a matching pair of shoes or digging through the couch cushions for lunch money.
This was the worst it had been. The worst.
He couldn’t ask his mom to fill in again. This was their busiest time of year at the marina, and his dad was already making noises about clearing cars off the lot to make room for the new ones that would be coming out.
Talk about being between the devil and the deep blue. His folks had already made it clear that he should give it up, that Amanda was too much responsibility for him right now. On top of everything else, he couldn’t bear to hear their “I told you so’s.” He supposed they were thinking of his best interests, but then, when it came to family, they’d always thought with their heads and not their hearts.
Jill’s family had never been pleased they had taken in a foster child. They thought she should have her own children—and pointedly emphasized Amanda was “not really theirs.” After Jill passed away, he’d heard from them only once.
What the hell was he going to do?
Deep inside, there were moments he could actually feel his heart ache. The empty feeling he had been carrying around for so long had become fatiguing, making his arms hurt and his head muzzy. He knew one thing: he yearned to laugh again. But if he lost his bid to keep Amanda….
“Dammit. Forget that. I’m not thinking like that. I’m not giving it up.” Dragging a hand over his face, Logan flopped forward, letting the chair slip into the upright position. Wedging both elbows on the desk, he absently fingered the cards in his Rolodex.
He’d already called everyone he knew, asking about babysitters. His secretary had given him the name of that place in Nashville that provided nannies, but warned this was the poorest possible time to pursue it; it could take weeks.
